The End of America’s Fake Consensus

When the New York Times recently published a long, painstakingly reported reconstruction of the Benghazi attack in September 2012, which left four Americans dead, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, it did not receive the deferential treatment that Cronkite’s misgivings about Vietnam did. Conservatives did not believe that the Times had provided something like a definitive account. Fair enough. But rather than actually bothering to provide a comprehensive and detailed rebuttal—rather than seeing if, for example, the critics and the Times could reach an agreement about what they each meant by, for example, “al Qaeda”—the mere fact that the New York Times is the New York Times, the flagship of liberal elitism (not at all the objective “newspaper of record”), meant that only the alleged underlying motives of the article could be challenged, not its argument, internal logic or supporting evidence. Meaning that conservatives argued that the Times wrote the article because it was in the tank for the presumed presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Most Popular

In an age without Cronkites, or even Brokaws, the origin of your argument—what thinkers used to call its sociology of knowledge—is all that matters. The argument will either be supported or lambasted depending upon whether its readers are “coming from” the same ideological or demographic place as its writers, or not. The actual evidence you assemble is almost irrelevant.

Sarah Palin demonstrated the depths—or the shallows—of these kneejerk tribal affinities when she admitted that, despite supporting him, she had not read the interview in which the Duck Dynasty cable star Phil Robertson spoke nostalgically about how happy African Americans were in the days of the apartheid South and, while professing his “love” for gay people, compared their behavior to swindling, terrorism and bestiality. Why bother to read the words on the page when you’ve already assembled your talking points? Robertson was “one of us,” and that, for Palin, was all that mattered.

So, yes, we know we are not going back to believing in an imaginary national unity based on discredited social hierarchies. The culture will no longer reflexively assume a Cronkite or Brokaw is speaking the “truth” because they are white and male and have those great voices. But a hierarchical and spurious objectivity should not give way to a radical subjectivity, either. If every perspective is already and always linked to our identities, then how do we talk to each other at all?

We now encourage the stories of those previously ignored—people of color, women, gay people, the transgendered, the impoverished, the unsung, the different from the white/male/straight norm. We honor their subjective experiences, as we should, but then what happens when others question not the right to those feelings, but whether they fairly and accurately reflect the social world? This can lead to arguments among even putative allies, like those that Michelle Goldberg described in The Nation, between mostly—but not all—white, professionally successful feminists, and mostly—but not all—“women of color” feminists with (again, mostly) less professional status.

But it is not only the less powerful who insist that their subjective apprehension of the world be validated. White men—armed white men—can also feel as if their understanding of how the world should fairly work should be respected. The Florida “stand your ground law” is a monument to the fearful and angry, those who “feel” threatened, a law in which, as the New York Timesput it, “perception counts as much as fact.” In the most recent instance, a white defendant, Michael Dunn, who went out of his way to pick a fight over loud music at a gas station with a van full of people he would never see again, claimed he saw a gun where none existed, and fired 10 unreturned shots at those who angered him, only reporting his actions to the police the following morning. A black teenager was killed. Somehow, this is gravely punishable, but not quite first-degree murder under the law in Florida. Dunn’s “experience,” his oral testimony about his “authentic” very personal anger and racial anxiety is an identity politics for people who claim to resent the identity politics of minorities, feminists and gay people. A lawyer in the Times article is quoted as saying, “The law takes the position that you have to step into the shoes of the defendant.”

This is the flip side of millions assuming Cronkite spoke for everybody, that he represented America, as LBJ worried. Nobody represents America anymore. Today people assume that, in speaking for themselves, their view of the world and how they fit into it should be accepted at face value. This is what Michael Dunn hoped. As his trial demonstrates, that’s not always a good thing—the right to tell your story is not the same as having it valorized—but we’re never going back to the good old days.

The core dilemma running through all of these episodes is this: how to address policy and political arguments, rather than instantly dismiss them based upon the cultural, ideological or demographic affiliation of an interlocutor. We have to imagine an enabling fiction: that these demographic and ideological original positions are—no, not eliminated, that’s not possible or desirable—but suspended. This is the only way we can engage people unlike ourselves. At the same time, we have to value the subjective experience of others—but without assuming that somebody’s “feelings” gives him or her the right to hurl abuse or even worse. Or that the story they tell about themselves isn’t itself a kind of social construction, not necessarily the unalloyed facts. That, too, has to be determined, not assumed: Michael Dunn can’t become the successor to Walter Cronkite.

In Cronkite’s day, we were already coming to the end of the “Mad Men” moment that submerged the possibilities and vitality of millions of women, people of color and gay Americans. We now frequently substitute for that anachronistic community a cosmopolitan atomism, celebrating both our diversity and individuation. Let’s take some of each: What we need now is a cosmopolitan community, at least when it comes to talking to each other. If we’re not going to pretend anymore that Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw have all the answers, then we’re going to have to create a new civic culture, and figure out a way to somehow respect, yet criticize each other at the same time.